“What?” said Gunnar. “That you’re splitting up? Of course she did.”
It surprised me that he hadn’t told them himself. Even if they already knew, he had a responsibility to say it in his own words.
“I will let you know where I am, once I know myself,” he said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
“There’s a lot to worry about,” Gunnar said—then Gunnar got closer to him. All this time he had maintained a distance from his father, like there was an invisible wall around him. Now Gunnar stepped inside that wall. “You’re sick, Dad.” He looked at the casino, all full of whirring, blaring, coin-clanging excitement, then turned back to his father. “You’re very sick. And I think if you don’t do something about it... if you don’t stop gambling, somehow it’s going to kill you.”
But rather than taking it in, Mr. Ümlaut seemed to just pull his wall in closer, so Gunnar was on the outside again. “Is that what your mother says?”
“No,” said Kjersten. “We figured it out for ourselves.”
“I appreciate your concern,” he said, like he was talking to strangers instead of his children. “I’ll be fine.”
“What about them?” I said. Maybe I was out of line speaking at all, but I had to say something.
Suddenly I found all his anger turned against me. “What business is this of yours? What do you know about our family? What do you know about anything?”
“Leave him alone!” shouted Kjersten. “At least he’s around when we need him. At least he’s there.” Which I guess is the best you could say about me. “At least he’s not away day after day, gambling away every penny he owns. How much money have you lost, Dad? Then the car—and now the house ...”
“You’re not understanding!” he said, loud enough to snag the attention of another family waiting to check in. They peered at us over their luggage, pretending not to. Mr. Ümlaut forced his voice down again. “The car, the house—we were losing them anyway—if not this month, then next month. A few dollars gambled makes no difference.”
I think he truly believed that—and for the first time, I began to understand what Kjersten and Gunnar were up against. Mr. Ümlaut had, once upon a time, been a lawyer. That meant he could create a brilliant and convincing argument as to why the hours, days, and weeks spent in a casino were the best possible use of his time. I’m sure if I sat there and let him make his argument, he might even convince me. Juries let guilty men go free all the time.
Then Gunnar dropped the bombshell. It was a bombshell I didn’t even know about.
“Mom’s taking us back to Sweden,” he said. “She’s taking us there for good.”
Although the news shocked me, I have to say I wasn’t surprised. Apparently neither was Mr. Ümlaut. He waved his hand as if shooing away a swarm of gnats. “She’s bluffing,” he said. “She’s been saying that forever. She’ll never do it.”
“This time she means it,” Kjersten said. “She has airplane tickets for all of us,” and then she added, “All of us but you.”
This hit Mr. Ümlaut harder than anything else that had been said today. He looked at them, then looked at me as if I was somehow the mastermind of some conspiracy against him. He went away in his own head for a few moments. I could almost hear the conversation he was having with himself. Finally he spoke with the kind of conviction we had all been hoping to hear.
“She can’t do that.” He shook his head. “She can’t legally do that. She can’t just take you from the country without my permission!”
We all waited for him to make that momentous decision to DO something. Anything. This is what Gunnar and Kjersten wanted. Sure, it wasn’t reconciliation between their parents, but it was the next best thing—they wanted their father to see what he was losing, and finally choose to do something about it.
I felt sure Gunnar and Kjersten had finally broken through that wall. Until Mr. Ümlaut released a long, slow sigh.
“Perhaps it’s all for the best,” he said. “Have your mother call me. I’ll sign all the necessary papers.”
And it was over. Just like that, it was over.
***
There are some things I don’t understand, and don’t think I ever will. I don’t understand how a person can give up so totally and completely that they dive right into the heart of a black hole. I can’t understand how someone’s need to gamble, or to drink, or to shoot up, or to do anything can be greater than their need to survive. And I don’t understand how pride can be more important than love.
“Our father’s a proud man,” Kjersten said as we drove away from the casino—as if pride can be an excuse for acting so shamefully—and yes, I know the man was sick, just as Gunnar said, but that didn’t excuse the choice he made today.
I felt partially to blame, because I was the one who convinced Gunnar and Kjersten to come. I honestly believed it would make a difference. Like I said, I come from a family of fixers—but what happens when something simply can’t be fixed?
I thought about my own father, fighting for his life, and winning, even as Mr. Ümlaut threw his life away, surrendering—and it occurred to me how a roll of the dice had given me back my father, and had taken theirs away.
The day was bright and sunny as we drove home, Gunnar in the back, me shotgun beside Kjersten. I wished it wasn’t such a nice day out. I wished it was raining, because the mind-numbing sound of the windshield wipers swiping back and forth would have been better than the silence, or all the false emotions of the radio, which had been on for a whole minute before Kjersten turned it off. Kjersten looked a little tired, a little grateful, and a little embarrassed that I had seen their seedy family moment. It made driving home now all the more awkward.
A lot of things made more and more sense now. Gunnar’s illness, for one. I wondered when he first began suspecting they might move out of the country. But being sick—that would change everything, wouldn’t it? It could keep his parents together—force his father to spend money on treatment instead of gambling it away. And since the best treatment was right here in New York, no one would be going anywhere. If I were Gunnar, I might wish I had Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia, too. Because the sickness of the son might cure the sickness of the father.
I held off filling our driving silence as long as I could, but there’s only so long you can resist your own nature.
“I had this friend once,” I told them. “Funny kind of kid. The thing is, his mom abandoned him in a shopping cart when he was five—and his dad treated him like he didn’t even exist...”
“So, do all your friends have screwed-up families?” Gunnar asked.
“Yeah, I’m like flypaper for dysfunction. Anyway, he had it rough for a while, did some really stupid things—but in the end he turned out okay. He even tracked down his mom.”
“And they lived happily ever after?” said Gunnar.
“Well, last I heard, they both disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle—but for them that was normal.”
“I think what Antsy’s saying,” said Kjersten, sounding a little more relaxed than she did before, “is that we’re going to be fine.”
“Fine might be pushing it,” I said. “I would go with 'less screwed up than most people.’” That made Gunnar laugh—which was good. It meant I was getting through to him. “Who knows,” I said, “maybe your dad will turn himself around someday, and you’ll hear his wooden shoes walking up to your door.”
“Wooden shoes are from Holland, not Sweden,” Gunnar said, but I think he got the point. “And even if he does come around, who says I will?”
“You will,” I told him.
“I don’t think so,” he said bitterly.
“Yeah, you will,” I told him again. “Because you’re not him.”
Gunnar snarled at me, because he knew I had him. “Now you sound like my mother,” he said.
“No, it’s much worse than that,” I told him. “I sound like my mother.”
The fact is, Gunnar and his father might have been a lot alike—e
mbracing their own doom, whether it was real or imagined. But in the end, Gunnar stopped carving his own tombstone. In my book, that made him twice the man his father was.
20. Life Is Cheap, but Mine Is Worth More Than a Buck Ninety-eight in a Free-Market Economy
On Monday I finally listened to my phone messages—they were all back from the night we first went to the hospital, because my voice mail maxed out in just a couple of hours. The messages were all pretty much the same; people wondering how my father was, wondering how I was, and wanting to talk. The wanting-to-talk part always sounded urgent, suggesting something that was, at least in their worlds, of major importance.
And so on Monday I finally went back to school for the first time since Black Wednesday, ready to take care of business.
At first people slapped me on the back, offered their support, and all that. I wondered who would be the first to say what was really on his or her mind. I should have guessed that Wailing Woody Wilson would be the first to cross the line of scrimmage, and go deep.
“Hey, Antsy, I’m glad your dad’s okay and all—but there’s something I need to talk about.” The awkward look of shame in his eyes almost made me feel bad for him. “About those months I gave Gunnar. I know it was just symbolic and all, but I’d feel a whole lot better if I could have them back. Now.”
“Can’t do that,” I said, “but how about this?” Then I pulled a notebook out of my backpack, snapped open the clasp and handed him two fresh contracts, which I had already signed. “That’s two months of my life,” I told him. “An even trade for the ones you gave Gunnar. All you have to do is sign as witness, and they’re yours.”
He looked at them, considered it, and said, “I guess that works,” and he left.
It was like that with everybody. Even easier with some. Sometimes people never got past “Listen, Antsy—" before I handed them a month, told them vaya con Dios, which is like French or something for “go with God,” and sent them on their merry way.
I witnessed the true nature of human greed that day, because everyone seemed to be on the dole. Once people realized what I was doing, it became a feeding frenzy. Suddenly everyone claimed to have given multiple months, even people who never gave at all. But I didn’t care. I was willing to go the distance.
By the time the bell rang, ending the school day, the feeding frenzy was over, and I had given away 123 years of my life. I told Frankie this when I got to the hospital that afternoon. I thought he’d call me an idiot like he always does, but instead he was very impressed.
“You had an Initial Public Offering!” he told me. Frankie, who was on the fast track to being a stockbroker, knew all about these things. “A successful IPO means that people believe your life is worth a lot more than it actually is.” And then he added, “You’d better live up to expectations, though, otherwise you go bankrupt and gotta file chapter eleven.”
And since chapter eleven was pretty annoying, I’d just as soon avoid it.
Of all the conversations I had that day, the most interesting was with Skaterdud, who was skating up and down my street when I got home from school. As it turns out, things were not well in the world of Dud.
“Bad news, Antsy. I’m reeling from the blow, man, reeling. I knew I had to talk to you, because not everyone couldn’t understand like you, hear me?”
“So what happened?”
“The fortune-teller—the one who told me about my burial at sea. Turns out she was a fake! Wasn’t even psychic. She’s been ripping people off, and telling them stuff she just made up. Got arrested for it. She didn’t even have no fortune-telling license!”
“Imagine that,” I said, trying to hide my smirk. “A fortune-teller making stuff up.”
“You know what this means, right? It means that all bets are off. There ain’t no telling when I do the root rhumba. It’s all free fall without a parachute until I meet the mud. Very disturbing, dude. Very disturbing. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”
“You probably won’t.”
“But I could, that’s the thing. Now I gotta restructure my whole way of thinking around a world of uncertainty. I ain’t none too unhappy about this.”
I thought I knew where Skaterdud was leading me, but with the Dud, conversational kickflips are not uncommon, and directions can suddenly change. “So I guess you want your year back, right?”
He looked at me like I had just arrived from someone else’s conversation. “No—why would I want that?”
“The same reason everybody else does,” I told him. “My dad’s heart attack suddenly made you all superstitious, and you’re afraid you’re going to lose all that time.”
He shook his head. “That’s just stupid.” He put a scabby hand on my shoulder as we walked, as if he was an older, smarter brother imparting deep wisdom. “Here’s the way I see it: that fortune-teller’s a crook, right? Tried and convicted. And in a court of law when someone is guilty of theft, they usually gotta pay damages to the plaintiff, right? And is there not justice in the Universe?”
“Probably, yeah.”
“So there you go.” And he tapped me on the forehead to indicate the passage of knowledge into my brain.
“Uh... I lost you.”
He threw up his hands. “Haven’t you been listening? That year will come from the fortune-teller’s life, not mine. Damages, see? She pays cosmic, karmic damages. Simple as that.”
In this world, there is a fine line between enlightenment and brain damage, and I have to say that Skaterdud grinds that line perfectly balanced.
21. We’ll Always Have Paris, Capisce?
The Saturday before their flight, the Ümlauts had a garage sale. It was more than a garage sale, though, since official foreclosure was three days away, and everything had to go before the bank took possession of the house. Most of what they owned was either on the driveway or on the dead front lawn. The rest was in the process of being carried out. I added my muscle to the effort until everything that could fit through the front door was outside in the chilly morning.
They had advertised the sale in the paper, so scavengers from every unwashed corner of Brooklyn had crawled out from under one rock or another to pick through their belongings. No question that there were deals to be made that day.
Gunnar seemed less interested in the sale than he did talking about what lay ahead.
“We’ll be staying with my grandma,” he told me. “At least for a while. She’s got this estate outside of Stockholm.”
“It’s not an estate,” said Kjersten. “It’s just a house.”
“Yeah, well, if it was here, it would be considered an estate. She even paid for our plane tickets. We’re flying first class.”
“Business,” corrected Kjersten.
“On Scandinavian Airlines, that’s just as good.”
That’s when I realized that somewhere between yesterday and today, Gunnar had already made the move without anyone noticing. His head was already there at that Swedish estate, settling in. Getting the rest of him there was now just a shipping expense. I marveled that in spite of everything, Gunnar was bouncing back. Suddenly he was looking forward to something other than dying. He wasn’t even wearing black anymore.
I helped Kjersten sort through things in her room, which felt kind of weird, but she wanted me to be there. I’ll admit I wanted to be there, too. Not so much for the sorting, but just for the being. I tried not to think about how quickly the day was moving, and how soon she’d be heading out to the airport.
“There’s a two-suitcase limit per person on the flight to Stockholm,” Kjersten told me. “After that, there’s an extra charge.” She thought about it and said, “I think I might have trouble filling both suitcases.”
I guess once you start parting with all the things you think hold your life together, it’s hard to stop—and then you find out your life holds together all by itself.
“It’s just stuff,” I told her. “And stuff is just stuff.”
“Brilliant,” Gunnar sa
id from the next room. “Can I quote you on that?”
Later in the day Mr. Ümlaut came by with a U-Haul to take away what few things didn’t sell, which wasn’t much, and to say his good-byes.
It was cordial, and it was awkward, but at least it happened. A ray of hope for the danglers.
“He says he’s got an apartment in Queens,” Gunnar told me after he left—which I suppose was a giant step up from a room at a casino—so maybe our little visit did have some effect after all. “He says he’s looking for a job. We’ll see.”
***
Later that day I got a call from Mr. Crawley demanding that I come to Paris, Capisce? I hadn’t been there since my father’s heart attack. Neither had my dad—he was still at home recuperating, and leaving restaurant business to everyone else, under threat of brain surgery by my mom.
“You will report at six o’clock sharp,” Crawley said. “Tell no one.”
Which of course was like an invitation to tell everyone. In the end, I only told Kjersten, and asked her to come with.
“For our final date, I’m taking you to a fancy restaurant,” I told her. “And this time no one’s grounded.”
When we arrived, I discovered, to my absolute horror, that Crawley had installed something new to complement the ambience. On the restaurant’s most visible wall was a giant framed poster of me pouring water over Senator Boswell’s head. There was a caption above it. It read:
PARIS, CAPISCE?
French attitude, with a hot Italian temper.
It just made Kjersten laugh, and laugh and laugh. I tried to tell myself this was a good thing—that she needed to laugh far more than I needed, oh, say self-respect?
Wonder of wonders, Crawley was actually there—in fact, I found out he had been there on a regular basis, training the staff, through various forms of employer abuse, in how to run a top-notch restaurant. When it came to the poster of me and my victim, he was very pleased with himself. “I also rented several billboards around the city,” he told me.
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